Author: Andrew Sullivan

Clive Crook scratches his head.

… looking hot. It's sometimes tough to keep both personae in tandem. Ah, yes, the British press. She wouldn't survive them for very long.

Apparently its open season in Minnesota:

In a dramatic display of the new Republican order, Minnesota’s state GOP banished 18 prominent party members — including two former governors and a retired U.S. senator — as punishment for supporting a third-party candidate for governor.

The stunning purge, narrowly passed by the state Republican central committee last weekend, suggests more than just a fit of pique: by banning some of the state’s leading moderates, the Minnesota GOP moved toward extinguishing a dying species of Republican in one of its last habitats.

It ought to be obvious that in order to win a gubernatorial race or a senate seat as a Republican, a politician had to have a lot of supporters inside the party, as well as appeal among centrists. Do the hardliners think that by expelling center right politicians, they’ll somehow eliminate the people who once voted for them?

Those exiled warned that the measure, which bans the 18 former members from participating in party activities for two years and bars them from attending the 2012 Republican National Convention, may provoke a backlash that undercuts the party’s competitiveness in a state that’s voted for the GOP presidential nominee just once in the past half century.

Ya think? 

Reihan joins the debate:

[I]t is possible that two people who are financially independent and capable of keeping their finances separate might have less “need” for marriage. But it is worth noting that these are precisely the people who marry in contemporary U.S. society. My suspicion — call me crazy — is that mass incarceration is a fairly important driver of the turn away from marriage among non-college-educated Americans, not a decision that marriage confers no “real protections.”

After praising a Rich Lowry column on the plight of working Americans, David Frum practically begs his former colleague to have the courage of his convictions:

Rich, if you take these concerns seriously as a writer and thinker – then take them seriously as an editor. Challenge your readers. Fix their attention. Urge them to see what you see. Emancipate them from pretend information and false ideas. Use your platform. Don’t ratify a pre-existing conservative consensus that fails to address the issues you identify as supremely important – change it. National Review could be hugely relevant to the debate over the future of conservatism if it would only speak clearly and consistently in favor of what you regard as true – and against the current orthodoxy that you tacitly concede is false. Lead!-because if you don’t, you leave the field to a reactionary conservatism that offers little or nothing to the hard-pressed people whose cause you took up today.

It would be fun to see National Review commit as a magazine to challenging its audience. Surveying the outlets that are making money on the right, however, is to understand how difficult it would be for Lowry to go that route. Once again, the financial incentives and intellectual health of movement conservatism are in tension.

Sam Roggeveen contemplates Wikileaks:

One reason there is so much emphasis (in journalism and the intelligence world) on uncovering secrets is that, in a sense, it is an easy problem to address — if you throw more resources and better technology at it, you will usually be rewarded with some startling new piece of information. … But often the problem is not that we have too little information, it is that we fail to correctly interpret the vast amount of information we have. That's a far more difficult problem to solve.

Formula 1 "supremo" Bernie Ecclestone got mugged and beaten up for his £200K Hublot watch. Cue the ad campaign:

Ecclestone apparently sent the image to Hublot himself, and suggested they use it in their advertising. The image appears on the ad above copy that states, 'See what people will do for a Hublot' and is then signed 'Bernie'. It makes for a striking image, despite being seemingly shoehorned into the top of what otherwise seems like any other expensive watch ad. And presumably it is intended to emphasise the value of the watches – but call us weird, wouldn't the thought of being beaten up for the watch you wear put you off buying one?

Ryan Avent fears that last week's unrest in Britain foreshadows greater turmoil:

There is a brewing tension within Britain over the sense that the budget is being balanced on the backs of the working class, while City bankers continue to pull in massive bonuses. It's a tension that will be familiar across Europe; in country after country pain is being exacted on those who feel themselves to be victims, at the behest of those who seem to be doing just fine. In country after country, occasional eruptions of public passion will come close to boiling over, as they did [last week] in Britain. And the real austerity has only begun; the cuts next year will be far more severe than what's happened already. Inevitably, some real trouble will develop somewhere; the near-miss, finally, won't miss. And in the ugly politics that follows, truly distressing scenarios, like a departure of one or several countries from the euro area, could suddenly seem much more realistic.

 

By economist Tom Lawler via Calculated Risk:

Bill O'Reilly has a piece up at Townhall that is as good a distillation as you'll find of how confused many Christian conservatives are about the message of the Gospels. Titled "Keep Christ in Unemployment," here's the key excerpt:

America remains the land of opportunity, but you have to work for it. The unemployment rate for college graduates is 5 percent. For high-school dropouts, it is 16 percent. Personal responsibility is usually the driving force behind success. But there are millions of Americans who are not responsible, and the cold truth is that the rest of us cannot afford to support them.

Every fair-minded person should support government safety nets for people who need assistance through no fault of their own. But guys like McDermott don't make distinctions like that. For them, the baby Jesus wants us to "provide" no matter what the circumstance. But being a Christian, I know that while Jesus promoted charity at the highest level, he was not self-destructive.

The Lord helps those who help themselves. Does he not?

No, actually. The radicalism of Jesus' message is precisely in his endorsement of giving – regardless of the worth of the recipient. I wonder how Bill O'Reilly missed the Sermon on the Mount in Sunday School:

"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take away your tunic, let him have your cloak also. And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away."

Notice any conditions in there about being a responsible citizen if you want charity? And that's the point of Christianity, and a pretty central one at that. God's mercy is unconditional; so should the mercy and generosity of Christians. Remember – Christians are required to love not just our neighbors or our friends or our families – but our enemies. We are asked to love Osama bin Laden. The Prodigal Son gets more than the loyal one, remember? The rich young man – who was also devout and worthy – was told that he had to give away everything he owned to enter the kingdom of heaven. He was not told to whom. Jesus himself urged us not to worry about material possessions; and he lived as a vagrant, with no source of income. The early Christians were told to seek the mercy and generosity of others in their peregrinations; they were to take as much care of themselves as the lilies in the field. Give us this day our daily bread. Not enough even for tomorrow.

This does not equal an endorsement of the welfare state. It's an entirely different argument how one tries to govern a fallen world. But it does equal a very clear and unsettling attack on the kind of fairness O'Reilly supports. There's a point to O'Reilly's argument. But it isn't a Christian point. The point of Christianity is, in many ways, its irresponsibility – and its injustice by any actual Fox News standards.